My Aching Back

My aching back is aching again! Would you believe I count that as a blessing in my life? Read on to find out why.

It’s been another series of those kinds of days when the nasty accidental things that happened to you when you were a kid decides to show up and make its presence known to you in a big and crazily painful way.

I was in a bad freeway wreck when I was 15 years old and my spine got trashed pretty badly. Although I was still mobile my neck in fact was broken and I didn’t know it – all they’d done at the hospital was patch up the bleeding wounds – they hadn’t bothered with x-rays despite complaints to them about how my spine felt.

I was even a quadriplegic for a few hours at home the morning after the accident, because of the broken neck shutting me off from all sensation or ability to move anything below my Adam’s apple, before my mother’s unrelenting back massage and prayers produced a click in my spine that restored feeling to the rest of my body.

Despite having gone to see two medical doctors immediately after who did nothing for me, it was actually a chiropractor I’d been recommended to by a friend who finally x-rayed my spine later that same day. He was also the one who provided the many long months of restorative treatment after my broken neck healed, that put me back on my feet whole and healthy again. But he told me from the start that the trauma to my spine was going to cause s0me issues in the later years of my life. Turns out he was right about that.

My aching back hurts because that trauma has turned into degenerative disk disease in a couple of locations in my spine due to those old injuries, and it likes to flare up once in awhile to remind me how lucky I am to not have remained the quadriplegic I had briefly become.

Sometimes our blessings come with pain attached, but that pain is as nothing compared to not being able to feel the pain at all because of a body dead from the neck down.

So I count my aching back as a blessing to endure, and am filled with immense gratitude for the forty nine years which have passed during which I’ve been able to experience pain at all.

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